Top IP strategy firm chooses PatSnap to support its technology research

PatSnap, the world’s leading provider of research and development (R&D) analytics, has today announced that Richardson Oliver Law (ROL) Group, creators of a leading open sourced patent ranking model, and of an annual patent industry benchmark report, uses PatSnap’s analytics platform to inform its research, improve its overview of the technology landscape for its clients, and enhance its work in Intellectual Property (IP) acquisition and patent strategy.

ROL Group’s main objective as a firm is to provide actionable advice on IP data and analysis for organisations within the technology industry. It enables its clients to appreciate the implications of their IP decisions, and guide them through unique IP challenges including buying and selling patents, developing licensing programs, defending against patent assertions and creating a value-driven IP portfolio.

In order to provide high-quality service in this area, ROL Group must maintain a comprehensive oversight into its clients’ technology areas and industries, and use data and analysis in order to determine:

• Who owns particular technologies
• The level of patenting activity in a specific area
• Who might own a controlling interest in patents
• Whether there is unusual patenting activity at a company or in an industry
• Whether there is increased investment in a technology area
• Whether a particular company has increased or reduced their IP investments

Kent Richardson, partner and co-founder of ROL Group, said that “this sort of information is not very easy to obtain. You have to conduct a variety of tasks like Google searches, looking through financial data, and we’ll also use patent information to get a more comprehensive analysis.”

ROL Group needed to ensure its data and analytics providers were best placed to provide the support it needed to perform these in-depth tasks on a day-to-day basis. “We compared five different tools along metrics such as comprehensiveness of the data set, user interface, the speed of the platform – especially for larger searches, price and the responsiveness of the team to requests. PatSnap won. It does a good job of supporting our needs from very high-level views down to great detail,” said Richardson.

By adding more than 125 million patents, licensing and litigation data, economic data, patent valuation, non-patent literature and image and chemical formula search, PatSnap has brought together the world’s most comprehensive R&D dataset, providing the most innovative organisations with a new, intuitive source of information during research.

“PatSnap enables me to dive into a general technology area, and get a sense of the landscape very quickly. I can understand who the primary companies are and what kind of assets they hold. At the other end of the spectrum, I can quickly understand what’s going on at a company,” said Richardson.

He continued: “for example, one of our clients wanted to know everything they could about a specific company, and the PatSnap default analysis worked great. In the course of about two hours, we were able to see what the target company had been filing, where they’d been filing, and when they’d dropped their filing rate. I was able to provide enough information to the client for them to ask some pointed questions about how that target company’s business was doing in specific business areas.”

“A typical workflow for us starts with us trying a few things within PatSnap, then focusing on getting the complete data set from PatSnap. We’ve built a number of tools that we use to evaluate patents, so we’ll then export the full set of data from PatSnap,” said Richardson. He continued: “one of the patent evaluation tools we’ve built gives us a raw rank of patents. So not only are we able to do some sampling, testing and visualisation with PatSnap features, when we export its data we’re able to use it effectively.”

Ray Chohan, SVP, Corporate Strategy at PatSnap said that “ROL Group has extensive experience within the technology IP area, and has built up a remarkable reputation amongst IP professionals, especially with their annual patent benchmark report that provides crucial insights into the patent brokering market. We are delighted that PatSnap has been chosen by ROL Group to not only support its day-to-day research tasks, but to contribute data to their annual report.”